Top 180 Tom Peters Quotes (2025 Update)
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151. “What is my personal strategy for the next 10 hours? Who can I talk with or what can I volunteer for to learn something new?”

— Tom Peters

152. “Confidence means non-paralysis, a willingness to act, and act decisively, to start new things and cut failing ventures off.”

— Tom Peters

153. “Send 10-TEN!!-people flowers. Today. As “Thank yous” for good things “small”-or even large-done in the last two weeks.”

— Tom Peters

154. “And remember: Everything in business is a paradox. To be excellent, you have to be consistent. When you’re consistent, you’re vulnerable to attack. Yes, it’s a paradox. Now deal with it!”

— Tom Peters

155. “Give a lot, expect a lot, and if you don’t get it, prune.”

— Tom Peters

156. “Treat the customer as an appreciating asset.”

— Tom Peters

157. “It doesn’t matter what product or service you’re offering; there is unlimited ability to improve the quality of anything.”

— Tom Peters

158. “Excellence comes from human beings doing things of value that customers find memorable.”

— Tom Peters

159. “The most important and visible outcropping of the action bias in excellent companies is their willingness to try things out, to experiment. If you wait until you believe you are safe, sure to be without occasional foolish feelings, you’ve most likely waited too long.”

— Tom Peters

160. “Forget loyalty. Or at least loyalty to one’s corporation. Try loyalty to your Rolodex-your network-instead.”

— Tom Peters

161. “Screw-ups are the mark of excellence.”

— Tom Peters

162. “I think economics is about passion. Economic progress, whether it is a two-person coffee shop or whether it is Netscape, is about people with brave ideas. Because it is brave to mortgage the house, when you’ve got two kids, to start a coffee shop.”

— Tom Peters

163. “He who makes the quickest, coolest prototypes reigns!”

— Tom Peters

164. “Design is so critical it should be on the agenda of every meeting in every single department.”

— Tom Peters

165. “Integrity may be about little things as much or more than big ones.”

— Tom Peters

166. “We’re going to see leadership emerge as the most important element of business – the attribute that is highest in demand and shortest in supply.”

— Tom Peters

167. “The little people will get even, which is one of a thousand reasons why they are not little people at all. If you’re a jerk as a leader, you will be torpedoed. And usually it won’t be by your vice presidents; it will be on the loading dock at 3am when no supervisors are around.”

— Tom Peters

168. “We are no doubt in the Great Age of the Brand.”

— Tom Peters

169. “Want to accomplish something, any-damn-thing? Sharpen your political skills!”

— Tom Peters

170. “The winners stun us not by their cleverness, but by the fact that every tiny aspect of the business is just a touch better than the norm.”

— Tom Peters

171. “Winston Churchill said that appetite was the most important thing about education. Leadership guru Warren Bennis says he wants to be remembered as ‘curious to the end.’ David Ogilvy contends that the greatest ad copywriters are marked by an insatiable curiosity ‘about every subject under the sun.’”

— Tom Peters

172. “Appreciation, applause, approval, respect – we all love it!”

— Tom Peters

173. “My real bottom-line hypothesis is that nobody has a sweet clue what they’re doing. Therefore you better be trying stuff at an insanely rapid pace. You want to be screwing around with nearly everything. Relentless experimentation was probably important in the 1970s-now it’s do or die.”

— Tom Peters

174. “Stop being conned by the old mantra that says, ‘Leaders are cool, managers are dweebs.’ Instead, follow the Peters Principle: Leaders are cool. Managers are cool too!”

— Tom Peters

175. “Statistically and emotionally, I believe that the way I can be of help to society is by doing what I know and what I’ve been good at.”

— Tom Peters

176. “Be guided by the axiom: There are no limits to the ability to contribute on the part of a properly selected, well-trained, appropriately supported, and, above all, committed person.”

— Tom Peters

177. “I wrote the book based on a blog that I keep. I also tweet. I don’t think that for an incredibly old fart I’m totally behind the power curve. I really believe that the essentials of human relationships remain the same.”

— Tom Peters

178. “You are your projects!”

— Tom Peters

179. “When you choose a managerial path, you are choosing to devote your life to people. Period.”

— Tom Peters

180. “I’m fundamentally not interested in the Fortune 500 companies – in US, Mexico, anywhere. The real backbones of economic growth are small and medium businesses.”

— Tom Peters

181. “The world has not just “turned upside down”. It is turning in every which way at an accelerating pace.”

— Tom Peters

182. “The hyperfast-moving, wired-up, reengineered, quality-obsessed organization will succeed or fail on the strength of the trust that its managers place in the folks working on the front line.”

— Tom Peters

183. “Had Twitter been invented earlier, my books would have been shorter.”

— Tom Peters

184. “Think about the market, think about the design, and think about who is going to design for that market. Hit the mark.”

— Tom Peters

185. “I found myself declaiming, full flower, for an hour on the “utmost importance and urgency” of Blogging, telling him in no uncertain terms that, especially in a high-end niche business, Blogging is “the premier way” to have “intimate conversations” with his Clients. Funny thing, I believe it!”

— Tom Peters

186. “If I read a book that cost me $20 and I get one good idea, I’ve gotten one of the greatest bargains of all time.”

— Tom Peters

187. “I don’t read many business books. I read good fiction. Business is about people, so my favorite business books are anything by Dickens.”

— Tom Peters

188. “The whole secret to our success is being able to con ourselves into believing that we’re going to change the world because statistically we are unlikely to do it.”

— Tom Peters

189. “If future competitiveness depends on treating people as an important part of the institution, the least respectful thing I can imagine doing to a human being is asking him to urinate in a cup.”

— Tom Peters

190. “Today brands are everything, and all kinds of products and services – from accounting firms to sneaker makers to restaurants – are figuring out how to transcend the narrow boundaries of their categories and become a brand surrounded by a Tommy Hilfiger-like buzz.”

— Tom Peters

191. “If the person you delegated to does the job twice as well as you would have done it, consider yourself a leader.”

— Tom Peters

192. “As far as I’m concerned, the first business leader who was able to establish a cult of personality around his tenure was Lee Iacocca.”

— Tom Peters

193. “I don’t believe in holy writ. Buy fifty books or twenty-five books, take three weeks off, read them and make up your own theory. The fact that you end up literally burning twenty-two out of twenty-five books is beside the point.”

— Tom Peters

194. “I think it’s wonderful to save the world, but you need to be part of the world, too.”

— Tom Peters

195. “I endorse a lot of people – sometimes people say I endorse too many books. And my response has always been the same: If I can get one case study that can give me one good idea that I can implement for $25, or for these days one-third of that on Kindle, I’ve gotten a very good deal.”

— Tom Peters

196. “Train everyone lavishly. You can’t overspend on training.”

— Tom Peters

197. “I’m about as far from being a flag-waver – you won’t find any American flag pins in my drawer – as someone can be.”

— Tom Peters

198. “Winners must learn to relish change with the same enthusiasm and energy that we have resisted it in the past.”

— Tom Peters